A Model for Christian Students of the Bible

TheTorah.com is THE online resource for serious students of Torah. With a few clicks, one can dive deep into countless topics that engage Torah as a living text for our day, informed by the best of biblical scholarship.

As a professor of Bible at a Christian university who also teaches Torah, TheTorah.com’s collection of essays functions for me as a virtual textbook. Its highly informative yet readable content is written by top scholars in the field, and I know my students are getting solid and reliable information that will push them to think critically about their own faith.

TheTorah.com is ideally suited to expose my Christian students to both Jewish tradition and critical scholarship. They are finding common ground with Jewish tradition and thus expanding their religious and critical horizons. It has been tremendously helpful for my students to see another faith tradition engage thoughtfully and critically with their own tradition informed by critical biblical scholarship. It is a model for them to consider doing likewise with their own inherited faith traditions.

One of the more important ways in which TheTorah.com has aided me in my teaching is by modeling for my students the centrality of Torah for Jewish faith and practice, and what it means to read the Torah from a critical perspective while taking it seriously as source of continued theological reflection. As is well known, too often in Christian history, the Pentateuch’s legal codes have been ignored, or worse, vilified, in favor of the narrative portions that can be tied more easily to Christian faith and practice. TheTorah.com illustrates for my students what it means to engage positively and with intellectual rigor that portion of Scripture they have not been taught to value.

In short, TheTorah.com is helping educate students to have greater hermeneutical humility by respecting and learning to value the traditions of the very movement that gave rise to the Christian faith.